Growing up, I am sure you’ve been told how hard your parents worked or how hard your grandparents had it. I recall my parents and grandparents telling me about life under apartheid, life without cars, electricity, indoor plumbing and how stupid cheap everything was in their day.
Back in my day, 1 dollar got you the entire store, as they like to brag, yeah, you had hard money back then. Sure they had far fewer people and productivity than we have today, but the amount of claims on that productivity has grown by obscene levels.
The idea of working your way to wealth and saving your way to wealth is a dead dream. A dream that these generations robbed from us but still want to hold us to the same standard.
Yes, we have it far easier in many aspects of life; access to health care, food, information, jobs, goods and services are probably 100 fold or better im comparison. However, as the expansion of the money supply grows, the claims on that productivity continue to centralise.
A fact boomers and generation X love to paper over without flinching. Yes, we are snowflakes, but because YOU don’t want to feel the pain of your leveraged buy out of the economy, those of us who aren’t on the asset ladder are condemned.
When you only have your labour as an asset to acquire wealth, it grows increasingly more challenging as the amount of high paying jobs are a scarce resource. If you’re not in the correct country, city, university graduate or field of study, your income options for trading labour is severely limited.
Maybe it was possible in the first few years when we came off the gold standard. Still, as fiscal responsibility was thrown to the wind in favour of, we’ll grow out of it somehow, the mathematical possibility of achieving that became smaller and smaller.
The window of productivity growth repaying the debt we have is long gone. At the rate we’re printing now, you cannot outwork inflation; it’s impossible.
Our parents and grandparents marginally felt inflation every few years; we are feeling in more frequent intervals than ever before.
To quote a famous football fan chant.
“Our currency gets weak; our currency gets weak; you’re nothing special; we devalue it every week.”
Peace has cost us strength; victory has defeated us.
The boomer and Gen X’s thought that after their hardships, no one should relive it, and it should be avoided at all costs. The next generation should not make the same mistakes and should be over coddled to compensate for the atrocities. These generations saw wars, genocides, famine, so their natural inclination was to protect us from obscenities. In doing so, they costed the idea of participation trophies and told us we’re special. We can do anything; we can be anything.
You’re our parents and grandparents. We believe you. When we got into the real world, we found we’re not unique—this idea of being special manifested in the millennial generation with a cohort known as the snowflake.
The term ‘snowflake’ is a derogatory term used to refer to millennials and infer that the generation is easily offended, attention-seeking and lacking resilience.
“You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same organic and decaying matter as everyone else.”
– Fight Club’s Tyler Durden
When you grow up under these conditions, facing the actual brunt of reality can be challenging, probably why we cower behind keyboards, gaming and metaverse engagement instead of facing up to the real world.
Working my way up.
All those stars on my report card didn’t get me out of being the intern coffee boy. You had to start your way at the bottom and work your way up. The thing I realised was there.
Now I am not saying my generation isn’t weak; there is a cohort of easily offended people who feel their outrage is a badge of honour. They feel like they deserve things they did not work for, and that, to me, is the issue. The fiat system with its welfare programs has created a generation of Oliver Twists, all standing there with their empty bowel and big doe eyes asking for some more.
Feel sorry for me; give me free stuff. Why should I have to work for it? I am unique; it’s a human right?
Get the fuck out of here; you only have a right to the property and productivity YOU produce and acquire; anything else is pure theft.
Earning more money, but making shit money.
When I reached working age, I earned more money than my parents did in nominal terms. However, the money supply had grown so much that the claims on every expanding goods and service weren’t as much as the opportunities my parents and grandparents had.
So while they earned fewer currency units, they could lay claim to more goods and services. A concept that is lost the previous generation as they assume all things remain equal.
Despite the improvements in goods and services and the expansion of assets to invest in, the medium we are rewarded has lost so much value.
To put this into context for you, according to Jobted.com, the starting salary/average salary for a teacher in South Africa is R 21 510 per month.
When my mother started teaching in the early 80s, her salary was R500 per month. Now to the fiat maxi, this seems like 43 times more. If you think that, then I am glad you can do basic arithmetic.
But if we compare this to the price of gold and use that as a baseline (disregarding the 2% annual inflation of gold). Then my mother’s salary in today’s terms should be around R38 000 – 40 000 adjusted for inflation.
So, you’re earning around 45% less than you would as a teacher now than you would as a teacher back in the 80s. This is not to factor in the higher tax brackets, which means your take-home pay is even less.
This is the sinister secret governments want to avoid talking about; they want to use metrics that seem like things are measurable and under control, like CPI and GDP. They don’t want you to calculate your personal inflation; if you did, there would be rioting in the streets.
Snowflakes are victims, in a sense.
The millennial generation is the largest working population as it stands today, and under the circumstances, it’s easy to see why they are pissed off. When you are robbed by ever-growing inflation and tax, you’re not only deprived of the productivity of your labour but your pride, your creativity, your identity, your ability to deploy capital behind your ideas.
You are robbed of the opportunity to pay for the mistakes of the previous generation. So I can see why there is such a generational divide, but I think the way we’re going about it isn’t constructive.
Instead of blaming the previous generation and trying to vouch for more extensive welfare programs and MMT, I say it’s time to take the punchbowl away.
Let’s not think we’re more moral than the previous generation, and when we get our hands on the money printer, we will do right by the population. It’s not going to happen; it will only be more of the same.
Stop trying to look for external solutions to your problem and look towards governments as your paternal saviour. In times of crisis, it’s time to look inward and save yourself. If everyone saves themselves, no one will need saving.
Avo toast with a side of self-pity.
Millennials are also labelled as the highest of high time preference consumers. We’re always looking for ways to scratch our itch for instant gratification. It takes a strong and disagreeable millennial to avoid all the consumer clickbait traps to try to get you to spend money. One part of this culture is naturally encouraged by the fact that fiat currency is losing value.
You would instead enjoy that marginal extra return today than save and lose it to inflation. The other part comes from the fact that as boomers retire, they’re laying claims to their pension, and as these pension funds come under strain, they’re investing in risker and risker cashflow opportunities which are typically the high time preference servicing companies.
Millennials are nothing more than collateral damage caught up in the shit storm of failed economic policy and the unwillingness of the older generation to accept their losses.
I can understand why Millenials are pissed off, whether they know the nature of things or they react to the environment, we find ourselves in today.
Sure we can be bitter, but why not be better?
The process of desnowflakification.
Once I got into Bitcoin, started learning how it works and why I should own it, I naturally became obsessed with stacking sats. I haven’t stopped, and I will continue to stack as long as there is productivity left in me.
Bitcoin’s proof of work system means there are no easy ways to acquire it.
- You either need to spend resources and energy to mine it.
- Trade a fiat currency in the open market to acquire it.
- Convince a Bitcoin holder to pay you for goods and services in Bitcoin.
There is no easy way out; there is no shortcut, there is no cheat code to acquiring sats, the same rules apply for everyone. You’re not fucking special okay?
Your race, your gender, your religion, your nationality, your skill, your qualification doesn’t matter to Bitcoin.
Once you realise the playing field is even and that bullshit special interest group or cosying up to someone closer to the fiat trough isn’t going to get you anywhere in Bitcoin, you’re forced to forget your snowflake ways.
The return of incentives for labour.
If you’re working for rewards in an ever depreciating currency, your motivation to want to work goes along with it. It’s no secret that millennials hate their jobs; it’s a universal meme. The reason is not that we are weak or don’t have resilience; that comes with incentives. The reason is the motivation is a reward in a weakening currency.
If you fix the incentives, the behaviour will adjust to align with the incentives.
Bitcoin is NOT a magic cure for your career or your work anxiety, that I can accept, but it’s hardened me to the bullshit. As a fiat normie, anything would set me off, overtime and working long hours seemed fruitless, and a waste of time.
Now I happily take all the bullshit on the chain, because I now have the confidence knowing I am no longer working for nothing. I won’t have to do this forever, I will soon have enough capital to follow any path, take risks, absorb the losses without it damaging my standard of living and continue on.
That’s fuck you money at play.
When you have that level of backing, fewer things tend to phase you as you take responsibility for your life.
Under Bitcoin, the incentive for me to go out and produce value in the marketplace is restored. I want to work; I want to earn free cash flow to put it into Bitcoin and truly reap the compounding rate my labour provides in the ever-expanding marketplace of goods and services.
In a hard money world, you get to keep all the rewards from what you do, and you live and die by your decisions. This return to personal responsibility reduces the incentives to act like a snowflake.
Hyperbitcoinsiation will be the death of snowflakes and the culture they hold so dear in their triggered safe spaces.
